This invention relates to a carding engine guard which is intended to shield operating personnel from coming into contact with the rotating parts of a carding engine.
It is essential for carding engines to be provided with suitable guards, since the inertia of a carding engine makes it a dangerous machine to come into contact with while rotating, as even if the machine drive stops quickly, serious injury can still be done. Therefore factory regulations require the provision of carding engine guards, and which must necessarily be sufficiently robust and rigid as to withstand an impact e.g. an unintentional impact from a fork lift truck or trolley travelling alongside the carding engine.
It is present practice to mount an arrangement of doors along each of the two longer sides of a carding engine, with the doors being hingedly mounted in a rigid support frame arranged alongside the card to move about vertical hinge axes between open and closed positions. The doors will be located in the closed position (extending parallel to the longitudinal axis of the card) when the card is operating, but one or more of the doors can be swung out to allow access to be had to the card when the latter has stopped so that routine cleaning or servicing operations can be carried out.
Evidently, with this existing arrangement, the doors project out into any transit path alongside the card, when they are in the open position, and which may therefore impede traffic of personnel or equipment alongside the machine. Also, by this arrangement of the doors, when the doors are open they do not allow easy access to all parts of the card, both by obstruction by the doors themselves, and also by parts of the support frame on which the doors are hingedly mounted.